


Scars Like Wings

by zjofierose



Series: Sheith Angst Week 2018 [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Blood, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Cutting, Depression, Heavy Angst, I'm not kidding, M/M, Pain, Season/Series 07, Self-Harm, if any of this seems like not your thing, move on past, this is pretty dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 03:02:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15832425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zjofierose/pseuds/zjofierose
Summary: Dysphoria, Shiro thinks, doesn't even begin to cover it.





	Scars Like Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Dark fic dealing with severe body dysphoria, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. Please read the tags thoroughly, and consider yourself warned. If I missed anything, hit me with a comment, and I'll add it to the tags.
> 
> All previous disclaimers about speed writing and lack of beta apply.
> 
> Posted to fill the Sheith Angst Week prompt "Scars" and the Voltron Bingo Sheith prompt "Scars".

His body is too new. 

He looks it over in the mirror after his first shower post-healing-pod, and can’t decide whether he wants to laugh or cry. He rubs the glass bare with the corner of his towel and tries to take it in: the white hair, the missing arm (Galra or otherwise), the scar across his nose. His skin is flushed from the heat and steam, and it only serves to highlight the fact that his body hair is also now white, and that’s just weird. He’s twenty-eight...ish, he thinks, stumbling over the fact that he has no idea what actual year it is on Earth right now, but this body is a toddler dressed like an old man, all smooth pink skin and white hairs, plastic and unmarred except for mark across his nose. 

He hates it. 

It’s not that he liked the body before this all that much, if he’s honest, with its metal arm that continually ached and its Pollock-like collection of bruises and scars, its pseudo-punk skunk stripe and its degenerative disease, but he was at least used to it. It was still the one he’d been born into, even if it had taken a beating. It was still muscles he’d earned, the white hair a result of things it had experienced with him in it. Each and every scar had come from a specific action or response, something he had done or had done to him, and while he’ll admit that he’s vain enough to have despaired, quietly, privately, of spending the rest of his youth looking aged and battered, at least he’d come by it all honestly. 

This… these muscles are bigger, the skin is smoother. All but one of his scars are washed away like they never happened. It may as well have new car smell, a hint of ozone lingering that he still can’t quite shake. It’s an attractive enough body, he supposes, but it’s not  _ his _ , it’s not  _ him _ . The old one, yes, it had done some terrible things, but only when it absolutely had to. This one has hurt his friends, has betrayed them. These hands have caused harm to the ones most precious to him in the whole universe, and now he’s supposed to call them his?

This body has never even drawn breath on Earth.

He feeds this body because he has to, sleeps in it because he needs to. It’s the only one he’s got, and as deeply, horribly, creepy as it is to think about those hundreds of other Kurons out there somewhere (did they even see them all? are there more?), he definitely can’t count on having another spare around, so. He has to muddle through.

He knows the word for what he’s feeling, and tries it out in his mouth sometimes when he’s alone in the dark. It’s more than just a feeling, though, because in his case his consciousness actually  _ has  _ been forced into a body that was never meant for him; even the brain still holds memories that aren’t technically  _ his _ , trojan neurons firing in little electric patterns that are not his own. And the memories that belong to his consciousness no longer match the reality of the flesh he inhabits: these feet have never touched a desert, these hands have never flown a hoverbike, this mouth has never kissed a lover. 

Dysphoria, he thinks, doesn’t begin to cover it.

\--

Keith sees him too well, always has, and even though Keith himself is clearly still hurting and anxious from all that Kuron… that Shiro… put him through, he hauls Shiro bodily to the training deck on the third day and tosses him on the floor. It’s not wasted on any of them that Shiro’s still “settling in”, as Coran so politely put it, but only Keith is willing to address it head on.

“You’re a liability until you know what you’re working with here,” he says, but what Shiro hears is  _ “I want to help you, how can I help you,” _ and so he picks himself up from the floor and smiles. Then he charges.

Keith holds nothing back, and it’s a relief. He’s not sure if Keith was always this proportionally fast and strong and was just restraining himself his whole life, consciously or otherwise, or if his time with the Blades and with his mother plus a couple years of physical maturity have unlocked some hidden potential, but he’s now more than a match for Shiro. Shiro’s reach is fine, but his balance is off, his arm is gone, and his flexibility is not what he was used to. Keith seizes the advantage and ruthlessly presses it, pinning him again and again to the mats until Shiro finally adjusts enough and catches him by the ankle, rolling Keith beneath him and bringing his considerable bulk to hold in the small of his back. They’re both breathing hard, but Keith looks cautiously pleased when Shiro lets him up, and nods in approval.

“Better,” he says, and Shiro nods in agreement. He’s going to hurt later, but it was better. Is better. 

“Thanks,” he answers, settling his hand on Keith’s shoulder out force of habit. 

“Again,” Keith says, and lowers into a crouch. Shiro blows his bangs impatiently out of his eyes and mirrors his stance, then takes a deep breath and nods.

\--

The next day Shiro’s body is purpled with bruises, everything from light dings that are the result of hitting the mat at slightly the wrong angle to what’s clearly a darkening footprint right across his ribs. He inspects them in the fogged up mirror with something like reverence: he did this. These marks are  _ his _ . He prods at them with a finger, makes them hurt. It’s a revelation. The only pains his consciousness has experienced in this body are the overall deep-seated ache of integration, the pains of hunger, or the results of clumsiness on account of his new size. 

These… these are different. They’re the deliberate result of something he chose, and he loves them.

\--

The bruises fade too quickly, and it leaves him feeling bereft. Sparring with Keith again helps, but as he progresses, the visible results of their sessions are fewer, and the one time he tries to throw their matches so he can get a little more marked up, Keith catches on fast, and scolds him roundly for not trying his best. He finds himself hyperventilating into the mirror two weeks later, trying not to cry at the fact that the only mark he has is a single, solitary heel-print in the curve of his shoulder. It’s not enough.

It’s not  _ enough _ .

\--

He’s cleaning some practice blades when he thinks of it, and he stops still, his mouth opening in a silent exclamation. There’s a spot on his ankle, or there should be - just a small line where he caught his leg on a piece of wood while he was running around barefoot as a kid. It had bled a little, and hurt less, but the mark had stayed with him his whole life, just a faintly traced reminder of summer and childhood freedom.

Or, it had. That mark is gone now, along with the rest of that body, of his body. 

He acts on it before he can stop to think, lowers the sharpest part of the blade to his leg, and while it’s only a practice blade, it’s still sharp enough to cut if he pushes it at the right angle, and he does. The pain washes over him like a surprise, a thin line of blood rising as he drags the blade away, the image of it a perfect sense memory to the first time. 

It catches up with him in the next moment what he’s done, and his face flushes hot with shame. He wipes at the blood with the edge of his sweatpants, and then at the edge of the blade with the bottom of his shirt before sheathing it and moving into the bathroom. All their quarters are well-stocked with medical supplies for obvious reasons, so it’s no problem to fish out an antibiotic strip and tape it across the small wound before washing his hands in the sink. He catches sight of himself in the mirror as he turns to dry them; same face, same scar, same white hair, but his cheeks are pink and his eyes are sparkling. He looks… more alive. 

He can’t hold his own gaze. He looks away.

\--

He never premeditates his little...sessions, and he does make an effort to resist, at least at first, but they are two months into a six month hyper-speed journey to Earth, hoping against hope that their home planet even still exists, and there are only so many times he can pull a t-shirt over his own plastic-perfect body before he breaks a little bit more. 

Just the old ones, he tells himself at first. Just the ones that he got on Earth, as a kid or in the Garrison. Just so he can remember, so he can be more like himself again, before Kerberos, before the Galra, before Voltron. This one here, where he’d tripped while drunk and walking on the railroad tracks, trying to impress a cute boy with his balancing skills. It cuts right across his knee, and smarts when he rubs a sprinkling of ash into it. The old one had carried dirt he’d never managed to wash out, a dark line of good time memories, and he wants it back desperately. Then there’s the tiny piece of graphite that lived at the base of of his left index finger, souvenir of a younger cousin horsing around with a pencil when they were kids. That one’s a little harder to replicate, but he finds a pencil in Pidge’s room and trims the end of it to a perfect point before steeling his grip and driving it precisely home. 

It doesn’t take long before he’s out of childhood injuries and marks, and he convinces himself for a full week that he’s done. He can see them now when he looks for them, knows that they’re there, reassuring in their presence the way little else has been so far. The more recent ones hurt when he presses them, a physical reminder of the sped-up memories he’s committing to flesh. It’s good, it makes him feel grounded, makes him feel more sane, more resident in himself. It’s counter-intuitive, he knows, he  _ knows _ , because by any objective standard, any rational observation (and oh, he’s carefully avoiding making those), what he’s doing is Bad and Wrong and A Problem. But  _ god _ , he thinks, lying alone at night in his cot, tracing the shape of the slice across the base of his thumb, why can’t he have this? He asks for so little. All he wants is to do well for the team, and to feel like a real person again. This is helping, so why not?  _ Why not _ ?

\--

During week seven, everyone goes a little stir crazy: Allura disappears entirely to somewhere hidden, cloistering herself with the mice. Hunk dismantles the entire kitchen in an effort to rebuild it in a more efficient layout, something about the optimal cooling time of mincemeat pies, which results in everyone being back on unadulterated food goo for five days. Pidge and Coran go on an absolute manic bender of science and nunvil, practically vibrating out of their skins and shrieking formulas at each other in voices that can surely be heard on Earth. And Keith and Lance… fight. Continuously. At length. Viciously, bitterly, with venom Shiro hasn’t heard from them in at least a year. After the third fistfight he breaks up between them he grabs them both by the scruff and shakes them, heedless of the blood running down Lance’s face or the way that Keith’s cradling his left arm. 

“ _ Quarters _ ,” he says, voice dangerous, “and I don’t want to see either you out of them for three days.”

Their faces unite in mutinous disbelief, and Lance opens his mouth to protest at the same time that Keith raises a finger to point, so he shakes them again for good measure before dropping them to the floor and pointing out the door. 

“Three. Days.” he says, and his face must be as scary as it feels, because they scamper away, still hurling insults as they part in the hall.

He drags a hand over his forehead and sighs. He’s got food goo in his hair and Lance’s blood down his shirt front. Coran and Pidge are still somewhere singing, he can hear it echoing faintly through the ship, and Allura and Hunk are AWOL. Lucky them, he thinks bitterly, and shakes his head to get a grip. He wants to go to Keith, wants to check his wrist and comfort him, because he knows how Keith gets whenever Shiro has to pull rank. Or, how Keith used to be anyway. This Keith is older and more confident now, so who knows what he actually needs from Shiro, and besides, if Shiro goes to him, Lance will cry foul for the rest of the trip, whining about blatant favoritism.

He goes and takes a shower instead, chucking the dirty shirt in the bin and letting the water wash over him, but it does nothing to quiet the manic chaos of his head. He tries to be methodical about it, tries to find comfort in the routinized actions of soap and shampoo, rubs himself down thoroughly with the towel, drying between each finger, combing each strand of hair.

At the end of it, he’s sitting on his bed holding a blade that he thinks was King Alfor’s, which seems appropriate somehow, given what he’s about to do. He’s put down a towel, and gathered the antiseptic plasters. It’s a comforting ritual by now, sinking himself into a shivery headspace of the anticipation that comes of physical release. 

The first mark the Galra gave him was across the ribs when they caught him, stabbing at him as he fought to evade capture, so he starts there, gritting his teeth and letting the stars burst behind his eyes as he drags the knife across and down. Blood wells up immediately, but he dabs it away, already moving on to the second, from a guard who took offense when he objected to Sam being separated from him and Matt once they arrived on the Galra ship. Third is a cut to his calf, sustained during his first bout in the arena as he hurled himself around behind a pillar to evade his opponent. That one had festered and scarred badly, so he may need to revisit it later, he decides, re-open it so that it heals as broadly and jagged as the first.

By the time he’s done, he’s panting and dripping sweat, the adrenaline pounding through his veins and the blood loss making him a little woozy. He applies pressure to his last wound for a long moment, then summons the energy to carefully dress it before he lets himself fall back on the towel, the ceiling spinning silently above him.

He sleeps like a baby, not waking for fourteen hours, dreamless and free.

\--

Realistically, he was only going to get away with this so long before someone noticed, and by someone, he means Keith. They’re sparring two weeks later when Keith’s foot catches in the base of the long-sleeved shirt he’s taken to wearing when they train and rips it halfway up to the collar. Shiro gasps at the surprise of it and clutches the sides together, but it’s too late. Keith’s eyes are narrowing at the bared expanse of Shiro’s abdomen and the fresh, pinkly healed line that traces up from his iliac crest to his xiphoid process. 

“That’s new,” Keith says, reaching out to trace it with his finger, and Shiro can’t help how he flinches away. It only serves to focus Keith’s attention, and Shiro quietly despairs. 

“No,” he counters, and Keith twitches an eyebrow at him, his gaze inscrutable. “It’s from the Frm’glar I fought in the Arena. My fourteenth fight.” His tone is even, but his eyes are desperately willing Keith to make the connection, to understand.

Keith sucks in a breath, biting at his lower lip as his eyebrows wing down toward his nose in a concerned frown.

“And this one?” he asks, pointing, but not touching, a small, round mark to the left of Shiro’s navel. 

“Mole removal. I was twelve,” Shiro says, heart in his throat. 

Keith nods slowly, dropping his hand. He’s silent for a long time, but finally raises his gaze to hold Shiro’s own. 

“Be careful,” he says, and Shiro gives a shuddering exhale. “We need you.”

Shiro nods, weak-kneed with relief, and yanks on his ripped shirt. 

“I’m just gonna… go change,” he says, and starts walking for the door. He can feel Keith’s eyes on him as he goes, and he has to force himself not to run.

\--

The close call with Keith combines with the fact that he’d run out of skin he could easily reach to put a near total stop to his activities, and for a while, it’s fine. He feels more himself every day, is adjusting to being in a body that doesn’t actively hurt all the time, that has more bulk, but also more endurance. His memories are starting to make sense of themselves, and he’s sleeping better at night. Small victories, he thinks, and considers himself grateful.

It lasts until they’re about a week out from Earth-fall, and then it all catches up with him at once in the form of a panic attack that lasts for hours and leaves him gutted and spent, curled up on the floor in a puddle of sweat and tears, dragging breaths in and out of lungs that aren’t his, that were grown in a tube, that have spent more time inhaling recycled air than they’ve ever spent in a place with sunlight and water and green, growing things.

He  _ needs  _ it, needs the grounding of the pain and the euphoric adrenaline rushing through his veins. He needs to know that he is connected to this lump of flesh and blood, that he’s  _ real _ , that he’s  _ here _ , that he exists in this plane, but he has no more scars to recreate that he can reach, and he doesn’t want to make new ones, not like this. Not from a place of fear and misery.

“Keith,” he whispers, then louder into the comms, “ _Keith_ ,” and waits.

It takes about two minutes for Keith to appear from wherever he was, and in that time Shiro has managed to get himself off the floor and onto a towel. His shirt was already gone, pulled off in the heat of anxiety as he washed between hot and cold, and Shiro steadies himself under Keith’s concerned gaze, forcing himself to sit silent and still even as his heart races in his chest.

“What do you need,” Keith askes, and it’s a statement, not a question.

“I can’t reach my back,” Shiro says, and sees the moment it clicks in the minute twitch of Keith’s left eye. “And I don’t remember exactly what it looked like. I need you to help me.”

The words hang in the air, part demand, part plea. He can see Keith’s mind working, his desire to help caught against his desire never to hurt, especially never to hurt Shiro, and makes himself watch as Keith comes to a conclusion, barely able to swallow with nerves.

“I won’t make you what you were,” he says, stepping forward, and Shiro’s heart sinks to the floor, his head falling and body beginning to shake as the shame rolls up over him, familiar and dark. “But,” Keith says, and he’s close enough to catch Shiro’s chin in his hand and raise it without Shiro even having sensed he was there, “I will give you something new.”

Shiro nods frantically, his eyes wide. 

“I need to hear you say it,” Keith says, unsheathing his blade, the determination settling into his face along the same lines it follows every time Keith prepares to fling himself after Shiro and drag him back from the brink. He’s the most beautiful thing Shiro’s ever seen, and he trusts him implicitly.

“I want this,” Shiro says without hesitation, “I need this. Please.”

“It’s going to hurt,” Keith says, his voice giving a nearly imperceptible waver, and Shiro nods frantically, making a mental note to figure out how to return this incredible gift that Keith is giving him sometime later, after he’s able to function again. Keith gives and gives, and Shiro takes and takes, and he wants to fix that, he does, but right now he is just a ball of pain and loss and need, and he needs Pygmalion to remold him, to make him new from clay. 

“Turn around,” Keith says, and Shiro goes, breath rattling through him like wind in a hurricane.

Keith’s right, it hurts. It hurts exquisitely, lines down his shoulders and across his back, stretching from the point of his shoulder down the backside of his arm. He tries to make sense of the pattern at first, but can’t concentrate long enough past the sting and burn of the blade across his skin to make heads or tails of it. He can feel himself shaking, can feel the trickle of blood down his back as it runs onto the towel, can feel the sheer focus emanating from Keith as he plies measured strokes across the canvas of Shiro’s skin. It goes on and on, dragging Shiro into his body more effectively than anything has ever done since he woke up, and he revels in it, lets it wash over him like a baptism, a benediction born of water and blood and the point of Keith’s Galra knife. 

When Keith exhales with finality and steps back, Shiro has no idea how long it’s been. Time has lost all meaning, and space only exists in a bubble around them. His face is covered in tears and his body is dripping with sweat and blood, his entire back on fire, and he’s never felt more alive.

“Stay,” Keith says unnecessarily, and steps away for a long moment before returning with several damp cloths and the antiseptic. He cleans his handiwork carefully, gently, with water and cloth, top to bottom, and Shiro lets his body shake and cry and breathe without inhibition, letting himself be reborn under Keith’s careful ministrations. The antiseptic stings all over again, and it’s not till Keith steps away again that Shiro can drag in a full breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling from his mouth, letting his fists unclench and his shoulders drop. 

Keith is utterly silent behind him for a long moment, then reaches out with the very tip of one finger to trace the lines he put on Shiro’s flesh, his breath leaving him in a watery exhale, and Shiro’s brain makes sense of it all at once, each line lighting up in his mind like a neon sign. He turns in a heartbeat and flings his arms open, catching Keith as he falls to Shiro’s chest, clutching at his arms and burying his face in Shiro’s neck.

“God, Keith,” Shiro murmurs into his hair, the pain fading into the best kind of white noise as the weight and warmth of the body in his arms anchors him more firmly to this plane than anything his own self could give, “ _ Keith _ ,” he says again, voice thick and nearly insensible as Keith nods furiously against him, burrowing into him like he can make a home there in the space between Shiro’s heart and sternum, like he isn’t already there. “You gave me  _ wings _ .”


End file.
